Signals have no meaning to the interviewing program. Instead, they pass information about the outcome of an interview back to the sample management system. The sample management script recognizes certain signal values and defines the actions to be carried out on sample records returned from interviews with each signal value. For example, a sample record for a completed interview might be transferred to a queue of records for completed interviews so that it cannot be selected again on the current project, whereas a record for an interview that has been stopped might be transferred to a stopped queue to await restart.

You can use whatever values you like as signals and can assign them whatever meanings suit your company’s requirements. As long as the interview and sample management scripts use the same values, everything works. (However, that in telephone interviewing projects, you might need to update some of the reports if you change the meanings of some signals. The interview scripting program has a set of predefined signals that are used by the standard sample management scripts that come with the UNICOM Intelligence Developer Documentation Library. These values are defined as constants in the Signals type definition: